


Pamaypay ng Maynila

by pentipus



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Dreams, Dubious use of Google Translate, Gen, Hypnagogic nonsense, Kaiju, Kaiju attack, Night Terrors, Pamaypay ng Maynila, Precognition, Psychic Abilities, Shoddiness, Tagalog folk songs, Trespasser - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-27
Updated: 2013-10-27
Packaged: 2017-12-30 15:16:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1020227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentipus/pseuds/pentipus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A survivor of the first kaiju attack gets surprisingly accurate night terrors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pamaypay ng Maynila

**Author's Note:**

> Constructive criticism would be amazing! It's been a long time since I've sat and tried to write creatively, so it would be lovely to hear your feedback.

The wet tarmac shone like a polished floor, broken by gaps and cracks and spent cigarette butts. Droplets of rain water clung to the undersides of wooden benches, bright white flecked with black.

I stared through the open window and breathed in the wet air, put my fingers into the droplets on the window frame and chased them over the black wood. Something was burning, the acrid smell of overcooked flesh and tumbled buildings filled my little room.

In front of my block, a line of trees, and beyond that, the giant felled carcass of a kaiju. It had been burning for four days now, long after the houses and offices and stores and schools had been extinguished. It rose out of the ground like a black mountain against the grey sky. A mound of dark flesh and electric blue veins.

Its blood had run through the streets for days after the attack, staining our boots and spoiling our soil. We traipsed through the toxic sludge as men in hazmat suits tried to clear the area. Yellow tape and black hazard signs, the sharp shush of gushing water on the roads.

It rained today, finally, washing away the blue remnants into the rivers, into the sea. Cobalt pollution in our waters, split into atoms and taken into the sky, where it hangs suspended in the dark clouds.

When we had first heard the booming footfalls of the kaiju we thought it was thunder. We counted out the miles between the storm and ourselves by the slow hard beats of our hearts. One, two, three...

But there was no lightning, at least not until we heard the screams, at first echoing like the cries of a child, then building, deafening, outside of our windows and doors. Then artillery lit up the sky like fireworks. Jets flew overhead, the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire punctuated by the roars of an impossible creature, towering hundreds of feet over the city.

From my room I saw it approaching, wading through the low buildings like it was crawling through molasses. Behind it tanks clunked over crushed cars and fallen bodies, shells crashing into the kaiju's flank, exploding red and gold and black against its thick skin.

I watched as it faltered, its great feet slipping over the grass of the park where I ate my lunch in the summer. Tearing up the turf with ease.

It let out a groan that shook the walls and then tumbled, its body shaking the floor on which I stood. Toppling the little things on my shelves.

In the weeks that followed the attack I had dreams about crawling into one of the holes left by the tank shells in the creature's side. My hands slipping on the wet putrid flesh, spongy beneath my fingers. Inside there were corridors, a labyrinth of dark red tunnels that I would slog through. And as I neared the heart, still beating thud thud thud even after death, I would awake suddenly. Shaking in the darkness.

We watched doctors and professors, military officials and presidents, talking on the TV about the attack. Explaining how the creature worked, where it came from, what it meant for us, and how it had changed the world for ever.

Eventually everything was harvested that could be harvested, the bones were slowly taken apart and taken away. I watched from my bedroom window as they cut the bones down into chunks, dismantling the beast like a lego house. And still I had the dreams. Foreign shapes shifting in the darkness, my night terrors showing me slithering tendrils that snaked across the walls of my bedroom, moving between the shadows. Hypnagogic horrors crawling through the open window, the pressure of their alien bodies on my feet, my thighs, my stomach.

I dreamed that there were more, waiting somewhere for us. Kaiju with many eyes, with claws and talons, with wings, and with great crushing mandibles. I dreamed of their blue blood, dazzling in the monochrome world of my nightmares. I dreamed of trees and birds and beasts, all falling before the kaiju, scattered and crushed to dust. The oceans plundered, the earth cracked and dried. And at the heart of it all, some great lidded eye, opening with a sickly sucking noise, and then closing again. Beyond that, another eye, and another, and another, opening as I fell through, struggling to breathe.

Something moved inside of me, trudging through my innards, clawing through my gut. I caught snatches of conversation, a woman singing a love song in a foreign language, “Ako ay umiibig, lapitan mo, aking giliw.”

_You approach, my dear._


End file.
